Optimizing Long-Term Player Tracking and Identification in NAO Robot Soccer by fusing Game-state and External Video

Giuliano Albanese*, Arka Mitra*, Jan-Nico Zaech*, Yupeng Zhao*, Ajad Chhatkuli, and Luc Van Gool

International Conference on Robotics and Automation Workshops, ICRA 2023 (CoPerception: Collaborative Perception and Learning)

Abstract

Monitoring a fleet of robots requires stable long-term tracking with re-identification, which is yet an unsolved challenge in many scenarios. One application of this is the analysis of autonomous robotic soccer games at RoboCup. Tracking these games requires the handling of identically looking players, strong occlusions, and non-professional video recordings, but also offers state information estimated by the robots. In order to make effective use of the information coming from the robot sensors, we propose a robust tracking and identification
pipeline. It fuses external non-calibrated camera data with the robotsโ€™ internal states using quadratic optimization for tracklet matching. The approach is validated using game recordings from previous RoboCup World Cups.